Last month, OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba said the company has disbanded its robotics team in a Weights & Biases podcast. "I was actually working for several years on robotics. Recently, we changed the focus at OpenAI. I disbanded the robotics team. There are actually plenty of domains that are very rich with data. Ultimately that was holding us back, in the case of robotics," said Zaremba.

Join live for the final day of Transform 2021, including the AI Innovation & Women in AI Awards. OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik's Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available. "So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data, and all our machine learning, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning -- they work extremely well, and there [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics," Zaremba said.